The Making of a History of Feminism in Japan

The Making of a History of Feminism in Japan

The Making of a History of Feminism in Japan

Last year, in 1994, Iwanami Shoten began publishing an eight volume anthology titled "Feminism in Japan."(1) am one of the co-editors of this anthology, together with three other feminist scholars, Inoue Teruko, Ehara Yumiko and Amano Masako (Ueno, 1995). The idea of the anthology was met with shock on the part of both readers and contributors. This was because they realized that feminism had reached a stage at which it could reflect on the past with a sense of significant accomplishment. Also, they were a bit surprised that Iwanami Publishers, one of the established pubishing houses in Japan, had agreed to promote this feminist project, something unimaginable even ten years ago. Some contributors were embarrassed by being memorialized like relics in a museum. Some readers expressed concern that feminism had become established and thus institutionalized.

Certainly, Japanese feminism has accumulated a history. It has its own history and has become an important part of the history that has challenged the world in the latter half of the twentieth century. That is to say, it has become something to transmit over generations. We receive students in our women's studies classes who were born after the women's liberation movement. For us, feminism did not existed before us. For them, it had already existed before them as something to inherit, modify, resist or keep at a distance.

There are several reasons why we decided to call the anthology "Feminism in Japan." First, we wanted to dispel the prejudice that Japanese feminism is a "Western Import"; and prove that it has its own raison-d'etre and its own original voices and discourses. Second, we wanted to work against the myth of one ethnic Japanese nation and to emphasize that among these voices, there have been important contributions made by non-Japanese, such as Korean women living in Japan. Our editorial policy was to cover feminist contributions originally written and published in Japanese and to try to represent the multi-vocal nature of feminist thinking in Japan. Third, we were conscious about foreign readers, who read and write Japanese the same time that Japanese readers do. Living in a global society, we believed that...